Developing practitioners understanding of new concepts: Foundational Economy, Circular Economy, and Social Value

The aim of the project was to support practitioners in Wales to develop a clearer concept3ual and operational understanding of how existing statutory frameworks and concepts like the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act (2015) (WFGA), Foundational Economy (FE)/Community Wealth Building (CWB), Circular Economy (CE) and Social Value can be incorporated within their processes, and practices. The project designed a workshop, informed by social learning theory, to achieve this aim. The workshops were designed to enable practitioners to engage with the terms and reflect on examples of implementation of the concepts with peers to ‘sensemake’ through a shared narrative process. The participants were supported to discuss the terms and start to develop plans on how to implement the principles of each concept within their workplaces.

We delivered the facilitated workshop, seven times across Wales, to provide practitioners with an opportunity to reflect, discuss and begin to develop plans that mitigate the ambiguity and conceptual confusion that exists within Public Sector Organisations (PSOs) around the above concepts.

The programme was split into three phases:

1. Engagement and coproduction

2. Workshop delivery

3. Project Impact capture and dissemination

The programme ran from 1 March 2023 to 30 November 2023.